


What He Can't Spare

by ljs



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-His Last Vow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 03:52:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1290262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-His Last Vow, diverging there from canon.</p><p>Mycroft hadn't predicted this moment, which made it so much worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What He Can't Spare

The fact that Mycroft didn’t expect it made it so much worse.

The Moriarty ‘return’ had happened, and Sherlock was back on English soil and free to go about his strange business, and well, a quick scan of all probable outcomes suggested to Mycroft that this puzzle would be solved soon enough. Crisis-mode was over. Or so he thought -- until, that is, he walked by Anthea’s office in the secret block below Whitehall, three doors down from his own.

In this case, ‘walking by’ meant that he gave a perfunctory knock on the door jamb and went in. She wasn’t his assistant any more, hadn’t been for years, but she allowed him liberties no one else would dare. He took them without considering for more than a fleeting breath the significance of that license.

She was speaking to someone on her BlackBerry – she had refused to trade up when everyone else had changed devices – and packing the Eyes Only files into the wall safe only he knew she had, which was hidden behind a print of a 1950s Yousuf Karsh photograph of Her Majesty. (He had given it to her upon her formal promotion out of his office and into an intelligence job purpose-built for her. Something about the calm determination in the Queen’s eyes reminded him of Anthea.) “No, I’ll fly commercial,” she said coolly into the phone. “I’ve the right papers.”

Mycroft leaned back against her bookcase with a fair attempt at nonchalance. This masked (he hoped) the sudden strange weakness in his knees. She couldn’t be planning– 

“Thank you, Gerald,” she said, “be ready for my signal from Warsaw,” and clicked off. 

“No,” Mycroft said.

Anthea placed the last file in the safe and shut its door. A spin of the old lock, a slide of the portrait over the hidden treasure, a sigh: he could have predicted her movements to the last millisecond. But this decision of hers he couldn’t have predicted at all.

"You can’t tell me No,” she said, and turned, and didn’t quite manage to smile. “Has to be done.”

“No. Not by you.”

She raised her eyebrows at that. “Mycroft.”

The sharp edges of the shelving pressed into his back. He was leaning more heavily than normal, part of his brain noted. She was calling him ‘Mycroft,’ which she only did when she knew he was upset, another part of him noted. His heart was racing at an unpleasant pace. 

All he said, however, was “You can’t be spared.”

“You set this in motion,” she said, still cool, mercilessly rational. “Lady Smallwood needs a liaison on the Ukrainian matter. If your brother isn’t to go – “

“You can’t be spared,” he said again.

She did smile then, and it was immeasurably worse, because he saw how much she hated the assignment. But her voice betrayed nothing. “I can’t be spared for six months, certainly. But I can take a week. Speak to Andrzej, assess the problem in situ, rework the plans.”

“We have others for that sort of work,” he said. “Your skill is as an analyst.”

She came toward him then. He caught her rich scent -- Penhaligon’s Night-Scented Stock, dabbed behind her ears and between her breasts – and felt her warmth, although she stopped without touching him. This close her eyes were deepest brown. He’d often had to force himself not to fall into her gaze; she had never appeared to notice his interest, except of course – 

“Who got you into Belgrade when you were extracting your brother from that prison?” she said.

“You did, but…”

“It was a rhetorical question.” Her lips were moist, he noted without wishing to. At this point in the day her lipstick had faded, and it was all Anthea underneath. She was still speaking: “Who made the first contact with that Bosnian double-agent for you?”

“All right, point made, you’re competent in the field.” He pushed himself to standing, with some intention of using his height to loom at her.

But she was too close, too close indeed. His hand went to her cheek almost without his volition. She was so very warm, and he… wasn’t. Never had been. Never had wished to be.

After Sherlock had made that annoying deduction months ago about Mycroft’s loneliness, in idle moments Mycroft had tested the hypothesis and found it mostly wrong. He was a creature of habit: the orderly foundation of St James flat, Diogenes Club office, Whitehall office; the self-care which, ritualized, meant he could function at his peak for the work of the nation; the retreat into silence that let his mind free for not just that work but also the alarums and excursions occasioned by his annoying yet beloved little brother. 

He did have his indulgences, however. A wine cellar stocked with mostly Bordeaux and a case of Pol Roger’s Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill. An account at his favourite Savile Row tailor, with the occasional splash out with Patrick Grant’s E Tautz & Sons ready-to-wear. Handmade shoes. And he had Anthea.

Not in an overtly romantic way, no, although he wouldn’t have liked to answer for some of his more pornographic dreams of her. In the sense that he could speak to her whenever he wished, whenever he felt… yes, lonely. In the sense that she was there for him whenever he knocked so perfunctorily at her door.

And she let him in, just as she now was letting him cradle her face. His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone, cataloguing the softness of her skin, the fine form of her bones underneath. This close he could all but taste the mint on her breath.

“Anthea,” he said.

“I’m still going,” she said.

“No.”

Surprisingly she smiled, and it was real, it was true, it was almost too much. Then she encircled his wrist with her fingers, there just under his cuff, and with her fingernail lightly drew a pattern over all his vulnerabilities. He felt it everywhere, in heart and muscle and cock – 

“You can’t tell me No,” she said, “and you might as well admit it.” 

Then she kissed him. Then she left him.

He didn’t know how long he’d stopped breathing, but when respiration and brain came back online, he blinked.

The hell of it was that she was right.

On the other hand, so was he. She couldn’t be spared, now more than ever. Which meant that he had work to do.

Back in his own subterranean office, he had his assistant David pull the necessary files –MI6, GCHQ, and his own personal notations -- on all embeds in Eastern Europe and the pressure-points in the region. Hands steepled and chin resting on his fingertips, he spent twenty minutes re-visualizing the connections between disparate bits of noise. And there it was.

On his way to Lady Smallwood’s office, he pulled up Anthea’s travel schedule on his tablet. He had three hours to catch her in Paris.

Lady Smallwood was receptive to his reading of the solution to their Eastern Europe problem, which would involve pulling three undercover agents and instead monitoring two different lines of chatter and four minor officials who were known to be susceptible to monetary compensation. She listened to his argument, scanned his report summary, and then said, “Agreed, this is a more efficient use of resources. And you may call back Anthea Matheson as well.”

Her shadowed eyes were far too perceptive, but he told himself he didn’t care.

Without questioning, David had cleared Mycroft’s diary for the next twenty-four hours and reserved the plane. It still was at the airfield where it had taken and returned Sherlock. When Mycroft, overnight bag and briefcase in hand, walked onto the tarmac, a light west wind momentarily sent his open overcoat billowing behind him like the snap of a cape. He resolutely didn’t let himself think about any chivalric or knightly comparisons. 

It was not he, after all, who dreamed of being a dragon-slayer. _He_ was the rational one.

Or so he told himself on the short flight to Paris Orly, during his passage through the diplomatic channel, while he arranged for her to be paged under her cover name. 

Then he went out to wait in the limousine he’d hired. 

A perfunctory knock on the rear window fifteen minutes later recalled his attention from the email he was reading. On the other side of the tinted glass, her shadow – and then she was inside, bringing cool air and the warm, spicy scent of twilight blooms. “Mycroft, what have you done?” she said sharply, as she turned to face him.

Silently he handed her the summary of the new plan of action. Silently she read it; he read the flickers of surprise and approval over her face as she registered the implications of his scheme. When finished, she returned the file, and then dipped her fingers into the inner pocket of his overcoat and retrieved his mobile. She glanced at it, and then put it back. 

“Yes, I could have rung or texted you the change in plans,” he said. “I chose not to.”

She was still leaning in, her breasts against his arm, and her brown eyes – so close, so real, so true – were serious. “Tell me why.”

This time he used both hands to cradle her face. She accommodated their change in position easily, without retreating, but she waited for him. He rather thought she had been waiting a very long time, waiting for him to understand her openness to his thoughtless incursions into her work and life.

He was thinking and feeling now, however.

So he sent his thumbs over those lovely cheekbones, cataloguing the softness and the strength in her. So he kissed her this time, feeling her mouth open to him, beginning a process of discovery he suspected would take even longer than her waiting had done.

However, rationally speaking, he now only had twenty-two hours before duty called. He broke off their kiss but kept hold on her, caught her gaze and kept that too. “I can’t spare you,” he said. “Give me tonight to explain.”

Then he leaned forward and instructed the driver to take them to the Ritz.  
………………………………..

He was – they were -- two hours late getting back to London the next day. Mycroft really _couldn’t_ tell her No.


End file.
